Hello,

I must have really screwed something up because I attempted to compile the latest 2.4 kernel so I could get XFree 4.3 working in hardware 3D mode with my S3 Savage card. I tried to compile the 2.4-22-xfs kernel that comes with Knoppix, but I get an error about __cmpchg being defined twice. A user on the DRI mailing list suggested I use the latest 2.4 from kernel.org because he thought the error was caused by a Knoppix customization. In any case, the 2.4-24 compiles fine on my computer using the Debian way of 'make-kpkg'. I then install it into lilo and reboot. I choose the new selection Linux2.4-24 and it starts to boot. Everything is proceeding normally but eventually, the screen is flooded with error messages that all say something about fork.c (line 139 I think). I get thrown to a login prompt and logging in as root works, but bash is so badly broken any command I type gives me the same fork.c error message. I notice my computer name is none instead of what it should be so it looks like the boot process breaks down somewhere in the networking part.

I have / on /dev/sdf8 and it is formatted as reiserfs. I have recompiled numerous times trying to compile things into the kernel instead of modules, but I always get the same problem. I have an all SCSI system using two SYmbios 8xx based cards so I compiled this into the kernel. My network is the builtin SIS900 chip on my K7S5A motherboard so I compiled this into the kernel. I know I am missing something stupid, but what is it?

I have no messages to help in /var/log because I assume the system kernel is broken so badly that logging is not operational yet.

Can anyone help me out of my stupidity?